Mr. Shirky took that message to a group of higher-education-technology leaders who have been buffeted by a rapidly evolving ed-tech landscape. Mr. Shirky, in a keynote speech kicking off this year’s Educause conference, explored how technology was changing everything, from research to publishing to studying.

lowering friction reduces costs, creates more opportunity. apply this to social good as a horizontal methodology, applied to the sharing economy. creates resilience, abundance of flexible resources in reserve for transitions and shocks.

Open access is increasingly used for journal publications, particularly in the sciences, but it is much less usual for full academic monographs, especially in the social sciences and humanities.

Yet it seems to me that open access represents the future for academic publication. It is a form of free knowledge-dissemination, using the new opportunities afforded by the web, and is very much in keeping with the open and democratising spirit of The Open University. It marks a striking contrast with the conventional mode of academic monograph publishing, in which publishers expect to sell only around 200 copies per monograph, each costing up to £80 in hard-copy format.

Here is an operational manual which guides creators step by step in the world of Creative Commons licenses, the most famous and popular licenses for free distribution of intellectual products. Without neglecting useful conceptual clarifications, the author goes into technical details of the tools offered by Creative Commons, thus making them also understandable for total neophytes. This is a fundamental book for all those who are interested in the opencontent and copyleft world.

More peer-reviewed, publicly-funded scholarly research is beginning to show up online and in full, in what are called “open access” journals – which operate on the principle that free distribution of this work is vital to the public interest.

So is accurately translating that work into Plain English, admittedly not always easy. Which is were outfits like ours come in. Our Open Science archive at Public Data Ferret gives a good indication of what’s at stake.

the National Aeronautics and Space Administration continues to extend its journey into the open government stratosphere with the launch of a redesigned open.nasa.gov. The site replaces nasa.gov/open.

The new NASA open government is a beautiful departure from standard NASA websites. In fact, it’s a lovely move away from the Web design citizens encounter at most of the thousands of federal .gov sites. In part, that’s because the new NASA open government site is built upon General Service Agency-approved technologies and the same open source platforms ( like WordPress) that you’ll find at top-notch blogs like BoingBoing.

The Open Source Food panel raised a diverse and complicated array of ideas about what exactly open source is and how it can be applied to food from software, hardware, social, and research perspectives. The conversation began by talking about how large amounts of information about where, who, and how our food is grown, as well as what processes touch it before it even gets to us, are often not available to the average individual.

Everyone agreed that openness and transparency are needed to improve our food supply chain. Using open source principles, the panelists commented, the costs of development for new technology diminishes and the rate of innovation increases, as products are open to anyone to tweak or use. This could allow for a "Kablooey" moment or breakthrough in how our food system might work better and be healthier for all of us, according to Stowe Boyd, Social Philosopher & Connectivist of Work Media.

How to share your Google+ photos using a Creative Commons licenseCNET (blog)Google+ makes it so you can easily share pictures through Creative Commons licensing, which gives you control over how they may be used by others, if at all.

In a previous life, Greg Hadfield, Cogapp's director of strategic projects, was the first Fleet Street journalist to leave national newspapers for the internet in the mid-1990s. Now, he is a leading protagonist in the movement to create "open-data cities" as well as a champion of semantic web technologies.Greg, a former news editor of The Sunday Times, was winner of Provincial Journalist of the Year in the British Press Awards in the early part of his career. He has written the cover article in this month's InPublishing magazine about how the rise of open-data cities may offer local newspapers the last chance to re-invent themselves.

The open source platform to write and publish print and digital books. Booktype is a free, open source platform that produces beautiful, engaging books formatted for print, Amazon, iBooks and almost any ereader within minutes. Create books on your own or with others via an easy-to-use web interface.

Build a community around your content with social tools and use the reach of mobile, tablet and ebook technology to engage new audiences.

Businesses are increasingly using open innovation platforms to harness the knowledge of a wide range of disciplines and stakeholders, and EDF's new "Eco-Challenge Series" aims to take those partnerships to the next level.

Is open data useful only to developers and researchers? Can 'average' users use open data to answer questions they have?

One of the (undeserved!) knocks against open data is the presumption that its core audience is technical and that the only people who can truly take advantage of open data are developers who can tap into APIs to build applications that then make sense of open data for lay audiences (unless the audience happens to be researchers in which case they probably have the necessary tools and the forbearance to troll through vast amounts of raw material). Viewed through this prism, open data is only effective via infomediaries.

That doesn't necessarily have to be true and one of the objectives of World Bank Finances (the newest part of the Bank's broader open data initiative)which went live on July 13 (read the announcement on the World Bank's open data site), is to make open data appealing and relevant for the 'average' citizen, while still providing the right incentives and tools to developers that want to build applications using the data on the site.

There’s been a lot of talk about open government, but one province is finally walking the talk. Last month, the B.C. government unveiled DataBC, a broad initiative to make available at no charge a wide array of data gathered by government that had previously mostly sat unused in filing cabinets.

A series of changes to ease the rules for freedom of information requests are to be examined as part of a public consultation designed to open up Whitehall.

Fees could be changed and a time limit, which means that departments can refuse requests if they take more than 18 hours to process, could be relaxed under government proposals in a consultation document.

Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, will launch the document as he pledges to deliver "the most ambitious open data agenda of any government in the world". The consultation document, Open Data, calls for the following changes to freedom of information (FOI) rules to be considered:

The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) studying the challenges of conserving the nation's ecosystems. The report, titled "Sustaining Environmental Capital: Protecting Society and the Economy" was presented to President Obama on July 18th, 2011, informs Alon Halevy, Senior Staff Research Scientist, Google Research.

The Arabic manuscripts collection of the Wellcome Library (London) comprises around 1000 manuscript books and fragments relating to the history of medicine. For the first time this website enables a substantial proportion of this collection to be consulted online via high-quality digital images of entire manuscripts and associated rich metadata.

Open-source group Eclipse Foundation has announced the creation of a new open-source initiative to define and implement a standard platform for the software development tools used in the automotive industry.

In a new and innovative way to leverage the company's new Hangout feature as part of Google+, Google's Data Liberation Front held a small press briefing with a handful of tech journalists today, walking them through why the company is focused on leveraging open standards and helping users get their data out. Alongside the discussion, engineering manager Brian Fitzpatrick said the company has extended its exports to include the +1s you've made for Web sites - a small bump obviously, but one that demonstrates their seriousness about making getting your data out of Google as easy (if not easier) than it is to get it in

Imagine an internet where every single webpage interconnects to other related information. While browsing a site about the history of the United States, for example, you could see digital versions of the documents that established it–with the click of a button. Or, while reading an article on an academic journal website, you could select a link that led to the primary sources or data collections used by the author. Wouldn’t it be useful to discover so much more information, without having to search for it? Tim Berners-Lee: The World Wide Web - Opportunity, Challenge, Responsibility, by Fräulein Schiller, on Flickr

This hypothetical internet would not only be an online researcher’s paradise; it would also drastically change how we all access information.

Luckily for us, such an internet is not only possible, but is slowly being created as you read this. How? Through the use of Linked Open Data, which gives us the ability to make the internet vastly more interconnected and interoperable.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

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